Yawn. The Alien franchise has long, long since lost most of it's credibility. This, tacking them into Joss Whedon's attempts to squeeze the last drops of life out of his franchise that never needed a season eight, let alone nine, really isn't helping things in the slightest. But then I forgot that Whedon helped put nails in the coffin for the Alien franchise in the first place.

Well, yes. I'm never one to complain about more Ron Perlman. And to be honest, I like Sigourney Weaver in most things she's in, even if she was visibly bored by the time she did AR.

But seriously, the film is so much garbage. It blatantly ignores the ground rules laid down by the Alien's inherited traits from it's host creature - and as such, where the fuck does the Queen Alien getting a giant womb come from, let alone the idiotic Newborn thing? It also treats the regular drones like not-so-dangerous mooks - which, granted, Cameron in Aliens did a little, but they were visibly still dangerous and pretty damn scary when in swarm-mode. I just think AR and the AvP movies really, really damaged the Alien franchise. Predator got a leg up again thanks to the pretty good Predators, but I'm really, really hoping Prometheus is the shit, and I couldn't give a flying fuck if it doesn't make Avengers money.

It's been years since I've seen it, but didn't the Head Scientist Dude make the Queen Alien w/ Womb (tinkering with it after they extracted it from the successfully cloned Ripley) because... because he thought it'd be (somehow) better with more lady-parts?

I think, as suggested below, that the attempts to clone Ripley mean that traits have crossed between her and the Alien Queen. The Queen gets the reproductive system of a human - which is really, bizarrely inefficient compared to the egg>>facehugger>>Alien system, and Ripley gains all the Alien bennies. The last remaining scientist who gets his skull bitten open by the Newborn after it's born confirms this when he bellows about the womb being Ripley's 'gift' to the Queen.

I always understood the Queen's womb as coming from the same place Ripley's acid blood and genetic memory came from: the two clones sort of bleeding into each other, and that was the first pair the scientists managed to clone that weren't too freakishly unmelded to be viable.

As for the Newborn, I have no freaking idea. Was Ripley supposed to be pregnant before dying, or did one of the scientists have sex with the cloned Queen, or what?

The thing is, it was never fully explained properly - presumably because, you know, movie!genetics or whatever, but I suppose the Newborn was like, meant to be the offspring of the new type of Queen deviated from the clone Ripley. As in, Ripley gets strength, agility, etc - the Queen gets a womb.

But it just never felt correctly explained as to why we still had drones - as in Aliens born from people the facehuggers impregnated, thus needing eggs (like Alien, Aliens, and even Alien 3 with the dog/ox Alien), and yet the nature of the new Queen meaning it produced children like a human woman does - not eggs. I know the crew Winona Ryder and Ron Perlman are a part of bring in test subjects, but this doesn't explain how we do have the distinct kinds of Alien, despite the changed Queen Alien being really important to the story.

So yeah - the Newborn would basically be the 'new' Alien model that the changed Queen from Clone!Ripley would produce, if it didn't cut it's mother's face off after birth. But.. Yeah. Exactly where the Queen gets the necessary material to make said baby from.. Not sure. Especially since the usual process does require a host/donor. Maybe it's asexual.

Yep - Alien 3 does have the 'Dog' Alien - although it's an Ox in the director's cut, I believe, so it's implied that the Alien is meant to take on traits from the thing it gestates in. Even the godawful AVP2 follows that rule with the Predator-Alien.

But.. Yeah. I think Aliens probably distanced the creatures from Giger's original design a little too much anyway, but I think they still had the right flavour and sexual creepiness to them as intended; Alien 3 turns it into a character dynamic, almost, but the choices in Alien Resurrection are really, really bizarre.

Yeah, I'm pretty certain it's only in the normal cut of the film that the facehugger attaches to a dog - In the original version, which is present on the DVD/Blurays these days, it was an ox. From the look of things, the switch to the dog worked a little better, but both contribute quite nicely to the notion of the Alien taking traits from it's host.

And again, the Ox is canonically part of the Workprint/Assembly edition - which is closer to what Fincher intended. Again, I think the dog works slightly better than the Ox, and there are a handful of bits in the Assembly cut that I don't think work - like the embryonic Queen forcing it's way into Ripley after hatching; That said, the lack of this sequence in the final film causes more problems with the facehugger that actually impregnates Ripley.

So.. Yeah. Alien 3 does have some problems. Still better than Resurrection.

Gah, this reminds me of a short-lived freeform play-by-post game I was in, years ago, which mashed up the Xenomorphs (and Yautja) and White Wolf’s World of Darkness (and a few other things). Yes, there was a Vampire Xenomorph, and a Werewolf one. And a cyborg one, with a multiweapon limb like the T-X/’Terminatrix’ from Terminator 3 (can’t recall if the multiweapon thing was on one of its forearms, or its tail).

Well, the cyborg Alien would at least have some grounding in the franchise, since I recall them appearing in levels throughout one of the first AVP shooters for the PC. Although god only knows why Weyland-Yutani or whatever would feel the need to 'enhance' the Xenomorph by giving it weighty cybernetic limbs.

From what I recall of the campaign, it wasn't Weyland-Yutani that made the cyber-Xenomorph, it was another corp; I can't recall if it had any ties to Weyland-Yutani, but it definitely had ties to the Technocracy (of White Wolf's Mage: the Ascension). The same corp caught the vampire Xenomorph (which got that way after eating a few regular Vampire: the Masquerade-style vamps), and attempted to replicate its abilities.

It was a very weird game.

(My char was ex-KGB who was lead to the Tunguska site by Baba Yaga, found a crashed Yautja ship, and used its power cores to fashion ten rings of fantastic power; eating some Yautja flesh [he was trapped in the ship for months] gave him a prolonged life, allowing him to use his rings to fight supernatural nasties for decades.)

There's also the Terminator/Aliens/Predator crossover mini from Dark Horse. In which one of the Skynet infiltrators (it set the Aliens future to have happened after Skynet era, which had been mostly forgotten by then) created Alien Terminators.

It's not really DH's best work, but at least it had entertaining action scenes.

Well, we are never told how far into the future Alien takes place, I believe? I think it's stated sometimes in the Terminator movies - or at least in EU stuff - that the war against the machines is going badly for Skynet, making their attempts to kill the Connors in the past a saving throw of sorts. So whilst it probably went on for several decades, I imagine the war against the machines couldn't possibly last forever.

Extras

Founded by girl geeks and members of the slash fandom, scans_daily strives to provide an atmosphere which is LGBTQ-friendly, anti-racist, anti-ableist, woman-friendly and otherwise discrimination and harassment free.

Bottom line: If slash, feminism or anti-oppressive practice makes you react negatively, scans_daily is probably not for you.